Tuesday, February 25, 2014

The Yiddish Forverts doesn’t publish a print edition
anymore. They still have a pretty active internet presence, but that’s it. I
used to check it out once in a while at the Rady Center library, but they
stopped subscribing a few years ago. The only Yiddish paper I see nowadays is
the Allgemeiner Journal at the downtown library.

They are two very different papers. The Forverts had a
number of very capable Yiddishists on staff, which is to say cultured,
intelligent writers with a serious attitude towards fostering the language for
its own sake. The Allgemeiner Journal is different. As far as I can see, they
want to put out a Yiddish paper that their readers will be able to
understand…that is, to spread their word as far as possible into the
English-influenced milieu of Orthodox New York. And so their writers make use
of a Yiddish that the Forverts people would surely look on with horror.

It’s something that I find fascinating to observe, and yet
I’m not sure I can convey it to a general readership. But that’s what I’m going
to try. Let’s see how far we get…

I have in front of me an article from last January written
by Mendel Adler, one of two or three regular staff writers who are together
responsible for 75% of the total content of the Allgemeiner Journal. Here he
is, reporting on the evacuation of a Palestinian encampment from “Area I-1”
between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim:

Let’s see how this compares with the other guys. Now, the Forverts
is really more of a news-magazine and so it focusses more on culture,
commentary and historical topics; but so as not to compare apples and oranges,
I’ve picked a recent news article, also relating to affairs between Israel and
the P. A. As above, I’ve kept my translation as literal as possible so you can
hopefully follow it word-for-word:

Okay, looking over my two examples I see that
I’m hardly proving my point. Maybe because their news-writers are more highly
influenced by the wider world as compared to the culture writers, there’s not
that much to choose between the two articles. To be sure, the Forverts has two
Hebrew words (I’ve marked them with italics) to the zhournal’s one. But even the Forverts uses internationalisms like administrazia and direkt in die händt when there are much more Yiddischlach alternatives…verwaltung
for adminsitration, and gleich in die
händt. Or even better: über-gegeben geworen
dem Instanz gleich in die händt arein. I like that.

And yet even so I find the Forverts excerpt, on
some subjective level, to be a bit more flowing and natural than the other one.
The very first words of the zhournal
article grate on me…”bei’m melden : in announcing”…what’s that called, where
the verb is used as a noun…a gerund? I don’t think that’s really an authentic
Yiddish form as it appears here. And the –ieren­-verbs
like “evacuieren” (another gerund I
guess, but nischt dâs bin ich ausen…that’s
not my point) where you take any international verb and make it Yiddish with
the –ieren ending ….well, the zhournal is rife with them.

I think the worst Yiddish is where they quote
Netanyahu…you can tell it’s bad because you can calque it almost word-for-word right back into English. No one ever
spoke Yiddish like that. But I have to allow them a little slack here. If you
literally took Netanyahu’s words and converted them into a truly idomatic
Yiddish, it would be very hard to avoid replacing the Israeli PM with Tevya der
Milchiger. “Would it be so terrible if they should just go somewhere where they
wouldn’t be making such tzuris for us?” Maybe it’s just as well to let the zhournal stick to its journalese.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

When I was very young, I learned the story of the Balfour
Declaration, and it went something like so: it was 1917 and England was at war;
and a young Jewish scientist named named Chaim Weitzmann had recently developed
a process that was of tremendous strategic importance. To reward him, he was
brought before Lord Balfour who promised him anything he wished for. “Nothing
for me,” replied Weizmann, “but for my people…” And in that moment the destiny
of the Jewish People was forever changed, and set on a path which led to the
creation of the State of Israel.

I don’t remember where I first heard the story; I only had
two years of Talmud Torah before my parents put me in public school. But I’m
guessing the story is still being told in our Hebrew schools today in very much
the same way. It may be a bit of a melodramatization, but I’m not here to
quibble with the details: in fact, the story is substantially true in its major
outlines. But it raises two interesting questions: first, where would we be if
Weizmann had not been in the right place at the right time…and secondly, what
good would it have done if Britain had not won the war?

Oddly enough, it turns out things might not have been so
different after all. Because it seems that Germany had its own Dr. Chaim
Weizmann…the “anti-Weizmann”, if you like, and his name was Fritz Haber. The
son of Jewish parents, he had converted to Christianity more as a symbol of allegiance
to his adopted Fatherland than through any religious conviction. In 1911, he
discovered a process whereby ammonia could be synthesized by direct combination
of hydrogen and nitrogen…a process which today bears his name, and which has
long since been adopted for the edification of high school students as the
iconic prototype of how to calculate chemical equilibria in mixed reactions. By
the second year of the war, Germany had been cut off by British blockade from
access to Chilean saltpeter, until then the world’s primary source of
industrial ammonia. The Haber process is credited with keeping Germany in the
war for three more years. And if that wasn’t enough, Haber was an enthusiastic
participant in the chemical warfare industry...a circumstance which led his
beautiful wife, Klara Immerwahr, also a converted Jewess, to take her own life
in 1915.

Post-war Germany was indeed grateful to Haber. As director
of the Kaiser Wilhelm institute in the Weimar Republic, Haber’s scientific
influence was unbounded. Indeed, even Hitler did not fire him after coming to
power in 1933. But as director of the Institute, Haber became responsible for
discharging all his Jewish colleagues and co-workers. And when it came to this,
he found his loyalty to the Fatherland was stretched to the breaking point.
After doing his best to secure alternate employement for his fellow Jewish
scientists, Haber left Germany for good, finding temporary refuge in England.
Here he accepted Weizmann’s offer of directorship of the Sieff Institue in
Rehovot, and he departed for Palestine in 1934. But he was already in ill
health and died enroute in Switzerland of a heart attack. (For more on Haber’s
remarkable life, you can read an excellent biographical essay by Bretislav
Friedrich which you can link to from the Wikipedia page on Haber.)

Weizmann and Haber…two very different men, destined by fate
to play complimentary and contradictory roles in world and Jewish history. And
what of their scientific legacies? Weizmann, of course, drifted away from
science as the Zionist enterprise occupied more and more of his time and
energies. Nevertheless, his process for the synthesis of acetone remained
industrially viable until as recently as the 1980’s: using bacteria from the clostrida family, Weizmann’s process
yielded a mixture of acetone, butanol and ethanol from ordinary starch.
Eventually, this method was replaced by purely chemical processes whereby
acetone is produced as a petroleum by-product. As for Haber Process, it is
going strong to this day. It has had an enormous impact on the worlds food
supply; it is said that one-third of the world’s agricultural production
depends on ammonia created by the Haber Process. To put it another way, every
other nitrogen atom in your body has at some time passed through the
high-pressure steel cylinders of a Haber Process factory.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

I don't know if there's a better book on physics than The Feynmann Lectures (in three volumes). I can't begin to say how important and valuable those lectures are. And yet he gets one thing very wrong, and it's a very important thing. It's the two-slit experiment.

Actually, he also gets the Stern-Gerlach experiment wrong in quite a fundamental way; I talked about this a couple of years ago in this blogpost where I show that the beam can't split in two: it has to fan out in a donut pattern. But the other day I was working with a student on diffraction patterns, and I was pretty shocked when we flipped open Feynmann and found this picture:

I wonder if you can see how wrong this is. It's not a little bit wrong. It's very wrong.

(EDIT Oct 2015: Actually it's not very wrong...it's a tiny bit wrong near the ends, but in the middle it's actually astonishingly accurate. I checked it with a ruler and the amplitudes line up really well. My mistake was to interpret the graphs as amplitudes instead of intensities. It's still a deceptive example in a way because it obscures the fact that you need a substantial overlap between the two patterns to get interference. Move those patterns any farther apart and the interference pattern disappears pretty quickly. But in this case, the graph is totally legit.

I'll leave the rest of my post undisturbed so people can see how wrong I was.)

The problem is in the (b) section, where he shows the intensity patterns you get from the slits taken independently...that is, with only one slit open at a time. He shows p1 and p2. If this is what you get with the slits open separately, then you cannot get the distribution at (c) when you open both slits. It doesn't work.

I am going to let you think about why it is. I've drawn the correct distributions at (b) down below...that is, I've drawn the distributions you'd need in order for (c) to make sense. You can scroll down and see what I've drawn.....

Thursday, February 13, 2014

“Bontshe Schweig” by I.L. Peretz is probably the most
well-known and widely discussed short stories in all of Yiddish literature. It
is the story of a humble and meek man who suffered in silence through all the
indignities of his miserable life, only to be greeted in the next world with
wild adulation by all the angels. His entry into heaven is a foregone
conclusion, but nevertheless his sins and virtues must be tallied up in a kind
of trial. First the advocate speaks, and it is only as he leads the tribunal
through one horrifying episode after another that Bontshe is able to convince
himself that they are actually talking about him. But even so Bontshe is afraid of what will happen when it is
the prosecutor’s turn to speak.

He can hardly remember the details of his past
life...what kinds of sins might he have forgotten about? But when the advocate
has finished and the prosecutor rises, he looks at the panel of angels and
begins:

“Rabossey…”; then pauses and
starts again, “Rabossey…er hât
geschwiggen. Well ich auch schweigen.” (He was silent…I will also be
silent.)

And thena gentle
voice begins to comfort him: “Bontshe
mein kind…in that other word your silence was not rewarded, but that was oylam ha-sheker; here, in oylam ha-emes you will receive your
reward”.

And then to his disbelief he is assured that whatever he asks for will
be his…anything!

The angels are waiting with baited breath to see what
Bontshe will ask for. Bontshe still doesn’t believe it. “Takeh?” he asks. “Sicher!”
he is reassured. “Nu”, he replies, õb asõ…will ich takeh alle täg inderfrüh (in
that case I would like every morning)…a
héisse boulkeh mit frische putter!”

And that’s where the story gets confusing. Because Peretz
doesn’t tell us how we are supposed to feel about this. All he says is: “Dayanim un malachim hâben arâb-gelâst die
köp verschämt; der kathoyger hât sich zelacht.” (Judges and angels hung
their heads in shame; the prosecutor laughed out loud.”)

What does it mean? People have been debating this question
ever since. Mock trials of Bontshe Shweig were once de rigeur wherever Yiddish literature was taught. Even translators
got into the act; in Nathan Ausubel’s “Treasury
of Jewish Folklore”, translator Hilda Abel gives this unbelievable
rendering: “…slowly, the judge and the angels
bend their heads in shame at this
undending meekness they have created on earth. Then the silence is shattered.
The prosecutor laughs aloud, a bitter laugh”. You don’t have to know much
Yiddish to see that she’s making most of that up. But she’s in line with the
general consensus: that the angles were appalled that life on earth was so
miserable that a man’s horizons and aspirations could become so pitifully limited.

I think people are missing the point. Bontshe wasn’t so
stupid. What was he supposed to ask for…seventy virgins and a boatload full of
gold? At least if you knew you were going to get a hot roll with butter first
thing in the morning, how bad could the rest of your day be?

I think the angels were disappointed because, like the Miss
America contestant who’s supposed to wish for World Peace, they expected
Bontshe, after that tremendous build-up, to wish for something great for all
mankind, perhaps even the coming of Mashiakh. (Pretty much the Jewish
equivalent of world peace, actually.) They were ashamed, and rightly so,
because they realized they had wanted him to wish for something that they wanted, not something that Bontshe
actually wanted. And I think that’s a pretty good lesson that a lot of
sanctimonious and moralizing people could take to heart even today.

Friday, February 7, 2014

I just came across an old article I posted on stackexchange.com a few years ago. Someone asked why "photons" appear to travel slower in glass, and I wrote a really good answer explaining it using waves. I'm reposting the whole thing below.
----------------------------------

I don't believe it is generally helpful to try and
analyze these things in terms of photons, so I'm going to try and point
out a few things about the classical picture.

The big difficulty from the mathematical perspective is that you're
working in a continuous medium where the phase of the wave is changing
continuously. It makes the visualisation much easier to start off with
if we restrict ourselves to a thin slab, where "thin" means small with
respect to the wavelength.

We know that there is a dielectric constant which represents the
tendency for charges to displace themselves in response to an external
field. But how fast to the charges respond? Is it a quasi-static case,
where the maximum field strength coincides with the maximum charge
displacement? I think we will find that this is the case, for example,
when light is travelling through glass.

Note that in this case the displacement current is leading the
incident field by 90 degrees. This makes sense: as the frequency of
light approaches the resonant frequency of the material, the phase lags
more and more; when the phase difference goes to zero, you have resonant
absorption. (EDIT: To be more clear, I choose to define the phase
difference in terms of its far-field relation to the incident field!) In
the case of the thin slab, you can see that the transmitted wave is the
sum of the incident wave and a wave generated by the displacement
current. Because you are absorbing, the phase in the far field must be
opposite so that energy is removed from the incident wave.

It is instructive to do the energy balance. Let's say the
displacement current generates a wave equal to 2% of the incident wave.
Then the amplitude of the reflected wave is 2%, and the transmitted wave
is 98%. It is easy to calculate (by squaring amplitudes) that almost 4%
of the energy is missing. Where does it go? It continuously builds up
the amplitude of the displacement current until the resistive losses in
the material are equal to the power extracted from the incident wave.

Let's now go back to the case of the transparent medium. Take the
same value for the displacement current, namely 2%. The reflected wave
is the same, but the transmitted wave is different because now you are
adding phasors that are at 90 degrees to each other, so the amplitude of
the transmitted wave is, to the first order, unchanged.

It's the phase that's confusing. Because we are in the quasi-static
regime, the phase is leading. In any case it must be leading in
comparison to the absorptive case. Don't we want a lagging phase in
order to slow down the wave? This is where you have to be very careful.
Because we are adding a leading phase, the wave peaks occur sooner than
otherwise...in other words, they are close together. This is indeed the
condition for a wave to travel slower. It's all very confusing, which is
why I took the case of a thin slab so the math would be simpler. Let
the incident wave be

sin(kx-wt)

Then the wave generated by the slab will be

0.02*cos(kx-wt)

Note the cosine wave leads the sine wave by 90 degrees. If you draw
these two waves on a graph and add them together, you can see that the
peaks of the sine wave are pushed slightly to the left. This makes the
wave appear slightly delayed.

The continous case is harder to do mathematically but you can see that it ought to follow by treating it as a series of slabs.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Prominent in my parents’ record collection back in the
sixties was a collection of Edith Piaf’s Greatest Hits. Piaf, in addition to
being a great singer, was a very compelling and iconic figure for France and
for the world at large. Perhaps no one, not even De Gaulle, symbolized the
courage and tragedy of that nation just emerging from its wartime ordeal as did
the Little Sparrow. “La Vie En Rose” is
her most famous song, but many others are instantly recognizable: “Non, Je ne
regrete rien” became a kind of anthem for the French Foreign Legion during the
Algeria conflict. But my favorite was probably “Les Trois Cloches”, which
became a hit in 1946. Briefly, it is the story of three milestones in a man’s
life: the day he is born, the day of his marriage, and the day he dies. Each
milestone is marked, in the chorus, by the ringing of bells: “une cloche sonne
sonne…”.The song is a homage to the
steadfast, simple peasant and his faith in the eternal. Despite all, life will
go on; and for that matter, France will go on, as is evident from the thrilling
resonances of Jean Villard-Gilles intricate poetry as sung by Piaf.

The French are of course inordinately proud of their
language. And notwithstanding the universal appeal of the song as attested by
its international success, one has to believe that the French must have felt a
particular collective pride in the sharing of these very personal emotions
through the medium of their national language in the hands of their national
icon, Piaf.

I started including an instrumental version of the song in
my solo piano repertoire around twenty years ago, and I very quickly noticed
how audiences would perk up when they recognized the song. My version was
probably more based on the American Country version, “The Three Bells”,
popularized in the late fifties by Jim Ed Brown and the Browns (no relation to
Little Jimmy Brown!). I learned the words and it became one of my most popular
and requested standards during the years when I used to entertain at the Times
Changed on Main Street.

It was only much later that I learned the history of the
English lyrics made famous by Brown and his sisters. It turns out they were
actually the brainchild of one Bert Reisfeld, and Austrian Jew who escaped
Europe before the war. Reisfeld does not shy away from the Christian symbolism
of the French lyric; in fact, he embraces it, making it if anything more
particular and less universal by utilising specific phrases such as “lead us
not into temptation/bless this hour of meditation”. As for the style, it is
true that an English speaker looking at a French text will tend to overestimate
is floridity on account of the Latinate forms which sound high-toned to our
ears next to their homelier Anglo-Saxon equivalents; but even taking that into
account, Reisfeld’s poetry is much more plain than that of Villard-Gillles. And
yet it is no less moving for all that. The song reaches its emotional climax at
the very end when Jimmy Brown has died and gone to heaven; the congregation meets
as always in the chapel to the sound of ringing bells, and prays:

“Lead
us not into temptation

May his
soul find its salvation

In Thy great eternal love.”

I can’t get over the fact that it took a Jew to express in
such a moving way some of the most Christian sentiments ever put to music. It
is also fascinating to me that both versions of the song are so intensely
evocative of virtually identical emotions in such very different cultural
contexts, and that the transplanted American version is no less at home in its
local context than the original French version was for Piaf’s listeners. From
my own experience in playing this song for audiences, I have to believe that
every listener, whether Christian, Muslim, Jew or even atheist, is responding
in virtually the identical way at the emotional level.

Marty
Green has recorded a Yiddish version under the title ”The Ballad of
Yankel-Yisroel”. You can find it on his album “A Boy Named Sureh: A Collection
of All-New Yiddish Classics”.